E-reader ownership doubles in six months
e-Reader ownership surges since last November; tablet ownership grows more slowly — The share of adults in the United States who own an e-book reader doubled to 12% in May, 2011 from 6% in November 2010. E-readers, such as a Kindle or Nook …
Context & Ripple Effects
Pew Internet's June 2011 tracking shows e-reader adoption among US adults crossing into double digits — 12% in May 2011 versus 6% in November 2010 — with Kindle and Nook-style devices named as the category's anchors. The striking detail inside the same release is comparative: tablet ownership is growing, but more slowly than dedicated readers over the same six months.
That ordering matters because it marks mid-2011 as a moment when the single-purpose reader, not the multipurpose slate, was winning the living-room race for reading budgets — a snapshot worth holding onto before either camp's next move.
First-order effects
- Amazon's Kindle and Barnes & Noble's Nook franchises see their combined installed base double in roughly half a year, converting each new owner into a captive storefront customer for digital books.
- Device makers' pricing and bundling decisions now reach twice as many US adults as they did last November, making every hardware discount a much larger revenue lever.
Second-order effects
- Tablet vendors face a market where the dedicated device is currently outrunning them on adoption, pressuring them to position slates as reading devices too rather than cede that use case.
- Book retailers without a credible e-reader line risk losing the device-to-storefront pipeline that Kindle and Nook owners provide, raising the stakes for anyone still selling only print.
Third-order effects
- If dedicated-reader adoption keeps compounding at anything like this pace, book discovery, pricing, and retail shift structurally toward screen-first consumption — with publishers and stores renegotiating their roles around devices they don't control.
- Whether the dedicated reader remains a distinct category or gets absorbed by general-purpose tablets is genuinely unresolved at this point; both trajectories were live in this data.
The trend: Dedicated e-reading devices are moving from early adopters toward mainstream US households, with their long-run shape contested by the rise of multipurpose tablets.